Enid Blyton’s magic has outlasted wokes and cancel campaigns

Long before wokism became the resident censor board for all literature, Enid Blyton had already been cancelled amidst a raft of charges ranging from sexism to Xenophobia. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)

I was 10 years old when I began a lifelong habit of keeping a stub of a pencil and a little writing pad in my grubby pockets. Much to my parents’ dismay, many perfectly good pencils were destroyed in that quest. But since that's what my hero Fatty, aka Frederick Algernon Trotteville, always carried, I wasn't to be denied.

That's the kind of impression the books of Enid Blyton, born this month 125 years ago, had on me at that impressionable age. Led by Fatty, along with Larry, Daisy, Bets, Pip, and Buster their dog, the famous five, solved mysteries and led a life which was idyllic for us in the Calcutta of the 1970s. We looked for our own versions of unsolved, and mostly unperformed crimes, and went about drawing up lists of suspects, subjecting some of the weaker ones to intense questioning. We had our version of the hated village policeman, Mr Goon, delightfully nicknamed 'old Clear Orf.'

And it wasn’t just me. Best-selling author Ken Follett was also enchanted by Blyton, enough to make mystery his métier. From the inventiveness of Noddy Goes to Toyland to the spiritedness of her truth seekers, he revealed the popular author as the one who got him hooked to the genre.

Not that Blyton had any intention of influencing future authors. She saw herself purely as a kind of medium, who simply and effortlessly jotted down stories and scenes that presented themselves with alarming and frightening serendipity. As she put it, “The whole story sparkles on my private ‘screen’ inside my head. I simply put down what I see.” She would have us believe she was “merely a sightseer, a reporter, an interpreter, whatever you like to call me.’’

She was prolific too, and thank god for that. She could write a Famous Five book starting Monday and deciding to finish by Friday afternoon so that she could go off to golf with her husband.

Her books in the meantime acquired a life well beyond their pages. From 1957, they were adapted into films, and it was BBC’s 1978 series and then the 1995 series of the ever-popular Malory Towers that gave the new generation a peep into the world of egos and fights, schoolgirl ribbing and petty robberies.

Yet every series only eventually managed to send swan-necked debutants out into the real world with not a whiff of the low temperament. That British virtue of looking down on sneakiness and doing the right thing is present in all her books, be it St Clare’s the Five Findouters or the Secret Seven, so no parent should actually be cribbing.

Into this nonpareil world, Blyton throws in the irresistible loyal pets that help in big and small ways to push forward the plot. Miranda the chattering monkey in the Rockingdown Mystery, Timmy, George’s spaniel in the Five Findouters, Buster, Fatty’s dog in the Famous Five, Kiki the parrot in the Secret Seven series have all given rise to so many pet fantasies and demands for a pet.

Of course, she copped her share of criticism. Long before wokism became the resident censor board for all literature, Blyton had already been cancelled amidst a raft of charges ranging from sexism to Xenophobia. The cardinal sin of writing that lacked in literary value had been heaped upon her in her lifetime by the BBC which banned her books for nearly 30 years on those grounds. It did little to dim her popularity. The fourth most translated author in history, after Agatha Christie, Jules Verne and Shakespeare, millions of copies of her books have been sold in 90 countries mostly to pre teens and teens.

As for lacking in literary merit, that was part of the charm of her books. They would never be passed off as classroom texts, the perfect formula to snatch the reading pleasure from any book. Left alone by adults who took the ambivalent route of neither approving nor disapproving the books, children through the decades have devoured the adventures of the famous five or Patricia "Pat" and Isabel O'Sullivan.

To this day there is the Enid Blyton society set up in 1995 that allows for a discussion forum with insights and images, and many reminiscences of happy hours lost in intrigue and adventure.

Her books are revered by many as comfortable old friends that evoked a strong sense of clubiness and a feeling that there was a set of very real friends for them in an enchanted world where fairness and goodness ruled.